The Washington Post has a short article on a survey that the Associated
Press (AP) sponsored to gather information about voter preferences
for the upcoming presidential election and their attitudes towards racial
groups.  The article can be read here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-associated-press-polls-on-racial-attitudes-were-conducted/2012/10/27/85da79b8-200a-11e2-8817-41b9a7aaabc7_print.html

Of possible interest to Tipsters is the following bit which I quote from the
article:

|The surveys, designed by AP and researchers at Stanford University,
|University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago, included
|overt questions aimed at understanding people’s attitudes toward blacks
|and Hispanics, such as how well words like “friendly” or “violent” describe
|African-Americans or Hispanics. They were also asked their views of
|President Barack Obama and his challenger, former Gov. Mitt Romney.
|...
|The polls also used a technique aimed at measuring what psychologists
|call “affect misattribution.” This involved showing faces of people
of different
|races quickly on a screen before displaying a neutral image that people
|were asked to rate as pleasant or unpleasant. Studies have shown that
|people consciously or unconsciously transfer their feelings about the
|photograph to the object they are rating.

This web-based survey is an interesting mix of explicit attitude processing
(i.e., traditional questions about race) and implicit processing
(i.e., the affect
misatribution) although it is not clear in the final AP report how the results
from the implicit processing task was used.  For the AP survey results, see:
http://surveys.ap.org/data%5CGfK%5CAP_Racial_Attitudes_Topline_09182012.pdf

The Washington Post mentions that equations were developed to identify
which background factors would predict a person's voting for Obama or Romney
but there is minimal info about this.  However, there is a mention of how many
votes Obama is losing because of his race.  It would be interesting to read a
more traditional report instead of what essentially is a long results section.

-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]

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